This seems to be the case with Mark Bao and his stolen MacBook Air.
Bao, you see, might have not done well in leaving his laptop in a lounge at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass., allowing an opportunist to swipe it earlier this year. However, he had already embedded a little wisdom inside of his machine by installing BackBlaze software.
This, the way CBS News.com tells it, allowed him to enter his laptop remotely and see what might be going on there. Or, indeed, going down.
And what a picture of humanity in the Facebook age was revealed.

"From the files on the computer and some legwork, I was able to track down who [the alleged thief] was, his Facebook page, his e-mail, and the [now] infamous videos," he told CBS News.com in a story published yesterday.